Fugitive Spring: A Memoir

A woman who grew up in the Midwest in the 1940s and 1950s describes what it was like to be the daughter of a doctor specializing in cancer, her experiences in a large Dutch immigrant family, and her adult years in college during the turbulent 1960s

In this gentle, unassuming memoir set against the Vietnam era, Digges (English/Tufts Univ.), a poet, recounts her coming of age and the break with home and family that emancipated her as a woman and a writer. One of ten children born to Dutch Reformist parents in Jefferson City, Missouri, Digges grew up amid the family orchards and the rats used by her doctor father for his cancer research. It was a childhood made lonely by too many siblings (no friend is ever mentioned) treated too much the same by preoccupied parents. In high school, Digges worked for a while in her father's cancer clinic, discovering that she had neither the ability nor the temperament for dealing with the gravely ill. She had a brief, unsuccessful college career devoted entirely to acting out, mostly sexually, her rebellion against her background. After flunking out, she married straight-arrow Charlie Digges, a favorite of her parents, and quickly became pregnant. She, Charlie, and the baby moved first to Texas, then to California, as Charlie went through pilot training and became a military airman, sent away on missions for long periods of time. In her solitude, Digges began writing poetry. She took writing courses at a nearby university and made a friend who seemed to embody all her own suppressed nonconformist urges; this friend died in a car accident. Digges and her husband finally divorced. Not bad, but not memorable. The events aren't especially dramatic; the language doesn't dazzle; the characters aren't particularly vivid (though the parents have their interesting features, they are never quite seen whole); no extraordinary insight emerges. Perhaps this is a case of a poet unable to surmount the potential quicksand of prose. -- Copyright ©1991, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

As the sixth of 10 children born to Dutch immigrants, poet Digges ( Late in the Millennium ) has had an interesting upbringing, and here she chronicles it with humor and love. Raised on a Missouri apple orchard, she was exposed to realities of life and death early on. Her father was a doctor specializing in cancer, so contact with the terminally ill became an everyday affair. She describes how he involved his children, letting them assist in his experiments with rats and mice. The family was also deeply religious, faithfully adhering to the teachings of the Southern Baptist Church. Adolescence was tumultuous for Digges; she railed against her parents' strictures and flunked out of the Christian college where they sent her. She married a Vietnam fighter pilot and had a child, but kept to her free-spirited ways, moving to California and Texas, and eventually returned to school to complete a graduate degree after her divorce. Evocative, this memoir is filled with childlike wonder at life's simple pleasures.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Digges, the author of two books of poetry, recalls growing up in 1950s Jefferson, Missouri, as the sixth of ten children in a Dutch Reformist family. Among her most vivid early memories are the family orchard whose apples were picked every August by prison inmates, the rats her doctor father used for his cancer research, and the pond where she almost drowned. Like the 1960s, Digges's adolescence was marked by rebellion; she dropped out of college (her father wanted her to be a medical artist), got married, and became pregnant. Living in California while her husband, an Air Force pilot, was away on endless missions, Digges began writing poetry and took writing courses at a nearby college. Although her prose has a poet's grace and vision, Digges's memoirs are disappointingly vague and disjointed. She sketchily portrays her parents and her siblings (her nine brothers and sisters are virtually indistinguishable), and she is surprisingly reticent about her development as a writer. An optional purchase . -- Wilda Williams, "Library Journal"
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.